Most of those postings seem like Ruby shops that have pipe dreams of doing Elixir stuff, some day. I'm skeptical many will get there, which is a shame because Elixir is the most fun I've had writing software.
We started in Ruby and have moved to Elixir (not a pipe dream!). If you have an SOA already, adding Elixir isn't a big hurdle. Experienced engineers can pick it up super quickly.
I agree it is incredibly fun! All of the hard work put into BEAM plus the easy-of-use of Ruby and the joys of functional programming make for a wonderful developer experience.
Ya I've actually seen a number a few shops making real moves in that direction, at least here in Vancouver. The OSS ecosystem is obviously pretty immature but I think it's getting good enough that it's starting to seem like a pretty viable option.
Indeed, it seems Elixir is one part complementary to Ruby and the other a great replacement whilst also keeping the main tenets of Ruby in-place.
The only issue so far is that the libraries ecosystem is indeed quite young but that is natural.
Still, Ruby (even without Rails) is at the moment a more productive environment.
I really hope Ruby "3x3" [0] will be released soon enough and projects like Hanami [1] become production ready so that it can coexist in a complementary way rather than becoming replaceable.
Anecdotal, I know, but I work for one of these companies. Definitely not a pipe dream for us. Most new projects are still in Ruby, but Elixir is now supported company-wide, and there's a number of projects being built in Elixir.
How did the migration go if I may ask? Was it progressive or clean slate? i.e. develop in parallel the new Elixir implementation and just switch when everything is green and all the specs match the Ruby app.
It's going well! Most of the team is eager to learn something new. The developer ergonomics in Elixir/Phoenix are quite a bit better than Ruby/Rails, which is really saying something because Ruby/Rails has been really great to us!
We're starting new projects in Elixir. We haven't ported anything from Ruby to Elixir yet, but we have a 9 year old ~100k lines of code (not counting views/tests) Rails app that we could make an argument to extract some functionality from.
I liked you more when you were a role model for Ruby snobbery. :( (Said, like, 95% in jest. I think. I think I think?)
But, yeah, I don't often stump for people around here but Pete is good people to work with if you're looking. I would rather have fire ants poured in my pants than do web work, but I'd jump at the opportunity to work with him again and if you're looking, you could do a lot worse.
